Biomedical Odysseys: Fetal Cell Experiments from Cyberspace to China

Abstract

In a world where technologies and risks move faster than laws can keep pace, thousands of people from more than eighty countries have journeyed to China to undergo fetal cell transplantation. This talk will examine the challenges of regulating experimental medical treatment in a globalized era, the ways in which digital communication technologies are transforming patient activism, and the unintended consequences of Chinese healthcare reforms. Drawing on her book Biomedical Odysseys, Priscilla Song will illuminate how poignant journeys for fetal cell cures become entangled in complex circuits of digital mediation, entrepreneurial frameworks of post-socialist medicine, and fraught debates about the ethics and epistemology of clinical experimentation.